Cedarville University DigitalCommons@Cedarville Department of English, Literature, and Modern English Seminar Capstone Research Papers Languages 4-15-2013 Life of Pi: Perspectives on Truth Sarah Morse Cedarville University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/ english_seminar_capstone Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Morse, Sarah, "Life of Pi: Perspectives on Truth" (2013). English Seminar Capstone Research Papers. 19. http://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/english_seminar_capstone/19 This Capstone Project is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@Cedarville, a service of the Centennial Library. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Seminar Capstone Research Papers by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Cedarville. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Life of Pi: Perspectives on Truth Sarah Morse Dr. Deardorff Senior Seminar 15 April 2013 Morse 1 Narrative and story predicate perspective. Stories that frame narration change perspective into a literary device. This narrative form enriches as it challenges the reader’s perspective on truth, often confronting readers with an ageless dilemma: is this narrator trustworthy? Framed narration also introduces the idea that truth is multi-faceted. Truth manifests itself through multiple perspectives. This is not to say that every perspective tells the truth, but it is to suggest that multiple perspectives provide a more comprehensive understanding of the truths embedded in a story. Perspectives give stories, life, and truth dimension.1 Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is a story on perspectives. Martel utilizes framed narrative to relate one boy’s castaway experience on a lifeboat with a 250 lb. Bengal tiger. The author- narrator introduces Pi’s story in the author’s note, which resembles a brief literary essay on failure and writing stories more than it does a traditional author’s note. To understand the author’s note is to understand Pi’s story, because the note introduces the central, story-shaping themes: hunger, perspective, faith, and truth. The note also functions to frame Pi’s voice within the author-narrator’s life story. The biographical details of this story bear a striking resemblance to the actual author’s life. Author and fictional narrator, Yann Martel was experiencing a midlife crisis in India when he was inspired to write Life of Pi. During this emotional low the fictional author-narrator met Francis Adirubasamy, Pi Patel’s childhood swim instructor. This chance meeting introduces the truth that perspectives create stories. From the perspective of Adirubasamy, Pi’s story “will make you believe in God” (Life of Pi x). From the author-narrator’s restless and hungering perspective, “That’s a tall order”(x).2 This order was not as tall as the author-narrator originally assumed. At the end of the novel Martel concludes with Adirubasamy “that this was, indeed, a story to make you believe in Morse 2 God” (xi). This conclusion is accompanied by a literary twist that alters everything—the reader is told a second story that challenges Pi’s original survival narrative. Upon finishing the book, the reader discovers that Pi’s story is not about the author or author-narrator’s perspective, but rather it is about the reader’s concluding perspective. Pi tells two stories, and he leaves it up to the reader to test, weigh, and choose between them. The first story is the story of Pi’s Pacific journey on a lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a tiger. This first story consumes the bulk of the novel’s text. The fantastical nature and unlikely coincidences that occur in this version of Pi’s story make it difficult for the Japanese men interviewing Pi at the end of the novel to believe his story.3 From their perspective, the story with the animals does not align with reason. Frustrated with their disbelief, Pi tells the men a second, reasonable story, allegorically substituting the animals for people: a cook (the hyena), his mom (the orangutan), and a sailor (the zebra). The second story is cold, brutal. Pi relates the second story in terse rational rhetoric. The tragedy of the second story is that it is not difficult to believe,4 but the brutality of the second story encourages the Japanese men to conclude that the story with the animals is “the better story” (317). The interviewers’ initial, concluding reactions to Pi’s story model skepticism and acceptance, the two most common reader responses to the novel. These responses raise interesting questions on truth: what is truth? And, how do we determine truth? Upon finishing the novel, most readers are suspicious that Pi and Martel have been bamboozling them all along.5 They commonly ask, with dramatic and exasperated intonation: “Which story is true?” On the other hand, a small minority of readers do not finish the novel feeling duped by Pi and the author-narrator. These readers intuitively sustained a higher degree of “poetic faith” as they read. Morse 3 Poetic faith is a temporary “aesthetic suspension of disbelief” (Wolf 118), and Pi’s two stories illustrate that poetic faith mirrors religious faith. The term “poetic faith” comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographical Literaria. In this work, the poet “theoriz[ed that] truth inheres even in depictions of the impossible” because a reader’s imagination willingly suspends rational disbelief in order to engage the truths of fiction momentarily (Cole, par. 4). According to Martel, “religion operates in the exact same way as a novel operates...A good religion makes you suspend your disbelief” (Interview by Steinmetz). In Martel’s novel, Pi asks readers to have poetic faith in the story with the animals because that story is “the better story” (317).6 Pi parallels poetic belief in the better story with religious faith through the words, “And so it goes with God” (317). This statement, “And so it goes with God,” is what literary critic, Steven Burns refers to as “the punch line of the novel” (185). This punch line is a deliberate, direct narrative challenge. Martel intended for his novel to aesthetically and linguistically challenge readers to give faith a chance by allegorically linking religion and story together. In an interview with Andrew Steinmetz, Martel explains: “[Life of Pi] is in no way a defense of organized religion. It is an argument that faith, or what’s at the core of religion, is something that should definitely be considered.” This challenge calls into question what we intuitively perceive as rational truth. From a philosophical perspective truth has been on trial for a timeless while, but over the past century, eras of existential, naturalistic, and postmodern thought have severely prosecuted truth. Existentialism, the philosophical framework that evolved and modernized into naturalism taught us that the subject can glean truth through experiencing nature. The truths that a naturalistic worldview offers are as incomplete as they are sinister. Naturalistic truth is hopelessness wrapped in a neat and tight smiley face: as subjects destined to face the Morse 4 disparagement of postmodernism, we should seek to live with as much compassion and care for others as possible, while striving to keep ourselves stable in an unstable world. Through a process of truth-erasure, postmodernism decentered the subject. Preceding the postmodern movement, the father of modern philosophy and the founder of God’s death, Friedrich Nietzsche would perhaps argue that truth has never been erased—it has just never been perceived.7 Regardless, recent literary critics such as Werner Wolf suggest that we have reached a philosophical plane that we can begin to label post-postmodernism (108). Whether or not we are now entering a time of post-postmodernism, the decentered subject has been seeking a sense of equilateral rest for decades. Yann Martel’s complexly simple novel, Life of Pi speaks to this philosophical vacuum. Martel’s survival advice is as follows: “The spirit above all else counts” (Life of Pi 167). Perhaps it was the wisdom of this survival advice, along with other aspects of realism in Pi’s first survivor narrative, that caused me to respond to Life of Pi differently than most other readers and scholars that I spoke with soon after finishing the novel for the first time. The more I discussed the novel with others, the more I came to realize that my initial response to Pi was unique because I sustained a large degree of undaunted poetic faith even as I neared the end of the novel. This “faith” led me to think that it was rather unfortunate that Pi had to lie to the Japanese interviewers and tell them a second story. I found it irritating when people asked me, “Which story is true?” upon finding out that I was lecturing on Life of Pi. From my perspective, asking this question was asking the wrong question. It is not that the question, “Which story is true?” is an invalid reader response question, it is just that this question leads readers into a gyre of circular-thoughts-and-answers that do not directly lead them to understand the meaning of the Morse 5 overall text. And, the whirlwind of doubt that results from this question is akin to the culture of doubt that postmodernism has injected into the western subject. As a theoretical limb of postmodern thought, deconstruction introduced a large strain of doubt into western culture. 8 Together environmentalist, Jack Robinson and literary critic, Werner Wolf argue that Life of Pi reacts against deconstruction with reconstructivist arguments. Robinson primarily argues that Life of Pi is an example of “ecological reconstructive postmodernism” (126). Wolf takes a more metaphysical approach and argues that Pi “reacts against postmodern depthlessness” with the post-postmodern suggestion that people return to religious belief (120).